Cassiodorus

Flavius Magnus Aurelius Cassiodorus Senator, born c. 490, d. c. 585,
was by turns statesman and monk, leaving behind a substantial and varied
body of literary work. The standard treatment of his life and work is James J.
O'Donnell, Cassiodorus (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1979). The full text is now available on this server. The most
important publication by far since 1979 was the Atti della settimana di
studi su Flavio Magno Aurelio Cassiodoro (Cosenza-Squillace 19-24
settembre 1983), a cura di S. Leanza (Soveria Mannelli Rubbettino Ed.,
1986).

The image here is from the Codex Amiatinus, created in Britain
in the eighth century but probably imitating a large Bible produced at
Cassiodorus' Vivarium monastery on the Ionian Sea two hundred years
earlier. This portrait expressly depicts the scribe Ezra, he who restored
the Law to the Jewish people after the Babylonian captivity, but the
arrangement of books on the bookshelves and labels visible on their spines
when closely examined suggest the disposition of texts of scripture known
from Cassiodorus' own library through his work the Institutiones.
Accordingly, many scholars take this image to be a thinly-veiled portrait
of the aged Cassiodorus himself.

In the original manuscripts of
Cassiodorus' Institutiones, there were illustrations, not all of
which are preserved in later versions. From an eighth-century Bamberg
manuscript, click on this thumbnail to see a larger version of the
best
representation of Cassiodorus' monastery at Vivarium. Notice the fish in
the vivaria at the bottom of the image. (The first page of a twelfth-century
Austrian manuscript of the Institutiones shows a more
restrained later presentation of the text.)